Even though the forever pursuit of more material wealth is exactly what brought the USA to this point.

> though the forever pursuit of more material wealth is exactly what brought the USA to this point

I disagree. It’s the corruption of democratic politics with money. And rage-based content providers (on cable TV and social media) who take any consumer/worker surplus and ram it into invented culture wars.

I think people have different connotations for the word wealth. For some that means people being able to afford housing, Healthcare, or taking a day off to spend with their children.

I think it is simply wrong on the facts that the national government has been primarily focused on raising national GDP and material well-being, or that it has done a good job.

The topic of growth is almost absent from campaign messaging, and investment in infrastructure for the future is a minuscule part of budgets.

If economic growth was the priority, we would see streamlined code and legislation throughout the country and focus on improving them. Politicians would be spending their time trying to figure out how to lower the costs of High-Speed Rail or Bridges or houses.

You are leaving out there was a global epidemic happening at the time, it's easier to see the logic of a global crisis which shutdown the global economy creating inflationary pressure from both supply economics, and mitigations taken by governments to keep money circulating (as much as we can disagree if it was the correct measure, it's understandable).

What is understandable about the current causes of inflation?

I think we need you to provide the numbers about what you consider "very unfair war debt" to the EU.

The 90B€ loan is just the latest mechanism for financial aid, there have been a lot of equipment transfers/donations from member-states, direct financial support for purchase of equipment, countries like Germany and Sweden even changed national laws to allow direct financial support (donations) to Ukraine.

The vast majority of the financial support for Ukraine has been donations, I'm not sure why you think otherwise so sharing the hard data you have could be a good start.

Russia != Soviet Union, even though Russia was the Soviet political-administrative center, contemporary Russia Federation is very different to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

Russia was also communist in Soviet times, and it's not like the slate was completely wiped clean when the Soviet Union fell. IIRC the Russian Federation also is officially the successor state to the Soviet Union, and took on its treaty obligations, etc.

> What I was aluding to is that people have profound consciouss experience when they are dying. Even clinicaly dead people with zero brain activity. But even if EEGs can't detect extremely low brain activity, it's still weird to have such rich experiences.

This is an extraordinary claim, any sources for it? Specially the point about "profound conscious experiences" in "clinically dead people with zero brain activity".

Even Opus 4.7 felt like a regression from 4.6, consumed a lot more tokens while I didn't experience any substantial improvements. The company I work at simply rolled back to 4.6 on everyone's configurations, disabling the toggle for 4.7.

4.6 has been my happy place for getting anything done for a while now.

It's the mandate from top-down. Of course it's a people issue, the problem is that the people creating this issue are exactly the ones paying us.

My manager got the mandate she needs to start coding, she doesn't want that, no one in our team wants that, she's a great manager exactly where she is right now. Nonetheless, we are helping her to code to show something for the higher-ups so she can keep her job, we really don't want to lose one of our best managers because some C-level is anxious about AI...

Even if it's a mandate top-down, you can:

- show increase in errors and outages caused by this approach

- integrate manager changes into your CI pipeline (coding / reviewing / testing / documentation)

- discuss how your manager can do the changes they need to do without sidetracking all other work

Make it indeed about the money: coding by PM + fixing what was coded + dealing with fallout is greater expense than coding by PM + automated guidelines + reviewing what was coded.

That is - if the environment you're working in is reasonable and it's not a power play by your PM

I don't know why you assumed it was a PM thing, the mandate is for EMs to be more "hands-on".

On your points:

Manager changes are always going to go through the usual pipeline, we are 10k+ people so there's not even a way to go all gung-ho pushing stuff. They need to be reviewed, approved, etc.

But we don't want our manager to code, nor does our manager, so we are just helping to cross the bare minimum expected from higher ups. For my team it's not an issue with our manager's code (those will be at max small fixes, well-defined, the most trivial stuff), the issue is they are mandating managers to do it.

I don't know what size of company you work at, where I am at there is simply no incentive for me to do all the extra work to show execs/higher management the issues cropping up.

I don't even have access to them, I have to pass through other channels, those might compile reports from many people to try to present a case, if they get to present a case then there's a whole other discussion to happen at director/VP/C-level about what they want to do, and since it goes against their big mandate it most likely will just be thrown out.

In this structure I have no motivation at all to go out of my way to perform data gathering/analysis, wrapping it all in a nice concise document explaining what the data means, potential remediation, etc. just to become a footnote in someone else's document that ultimately will not change anything from the VP/C-level mandate.

I assumed that as it was hitting too close home (both PMs and EMs were expected to use AI, with PM trying to code in solutions that they didn't have expertise nor domain knowledge to deal with; EM was prototyping solutions that had access to prod DB that were shut down as soon as we found out). I can only symphatize nonetheless and thank you for giving your PoV.

For a brief period it was social. Even if you had hundreds of people you had barely interacted with there were still people you continued to interact in real life from that lot.

Getting updates helped me even to form friendships long after the first interaction where we had added each other, I'd see someone I had connected with visiting a place nearby, and could go grab a beer with them while they are around. Or the other way around, I'd be visiting their city and would try to catch up, more often than not it helped to keep in touch, develop a deeper friendship, etc.

That is absolutely dead nowadays, it's drowned in noise on any "social" feature (feeds, Instagram stories [and similar features in other "social" apps], etc.), just a barrage of ads, influencer bullshit, and the odd friend update that isn't just a meme...

The worst part for me is that it was a deliberate choice from these companies to disappear with most social aspects of these apps in favour of the money printing scheme that created the whole influencer culture.

I still have hopes for the rebound, when people get extremely fed up with how these apps work, and something different appears to retake what "social" means, not this doublespeak-esque meaning it came to be.

No amount of nationalistic proselytism makes it okay or just "a bit mean" to say:

> A nation of slaves with desperate delusions of grandeur.

> build some toilets or whatever.

It's not just perhaps a bit mean, it's thought-terminating immature racist bullshit when you could have many other better arguments against nationalism in general.

You may be annoyed by the pointless nationalism, it doesn't give you the right to be a racist asshole against it.

> Tesla has been able to demonstrate significant growth which Toyota hasn't.

That doesn't mean much when Toyota was already a behemoth company, it's much harder to grow when you are already enormous.